Ten Conservative Books

The political and moral attitude called conservatism does'not
come-out of a book; indeed,, some of the most conservative folk I
have known have been distinctly unbookish. For the sources of a
conservative order are not theoretical writings, but rather cus t
om, conventibn, and continuity. Edmund Burke could imagine nothing
more wicked than the heart of an abstract metaphysician in
politics--that is, a learned fool or rogue who fancies that he can
sweep away the complex institutions of a civilized society, pa
infully developed over centuries of historical experience, in order
to substitute some bookish design of his own for the Terrestrial
Paradise. There exists, then, no 'Conservative equivalent of Das
Kapital; and, God willing, there never will be.

To put thi s another way, conservatism is not a bundle of theories
got up by some closet philosopher. on the contrary, the
conservative conviction grows out of experience: the experience of
the species, of the nation, of the person. As I pointed out in my
most recen t Heritage Lecture, conservatism is the negation of
ideology. The informed conservative understands that our 20th
century social institutions--the common law being a good example of
this--have developed slowly by compromise, consensus, and the test
of prac t icality. They did not spring full-grown out of somebody's
book; and it is the practical statesman, rather than the visionary
recluse, who has maintained a healthy tension between the claims of
authority and the claims of freedom; who has shaped a tolerabl e
political constitution.

The Constitution of the United States, two centuries old, is a
sufficient example of the origin of conservative institutions in
the people's experience, not from abstract treatises. The
better-schooled delegates to the Constitutio nal Convention, among
them Hamilton and Madison, would refer now and again to Aristotle
or to Montesquieut by way of reinforcing an argument; yet their own
political wisdom, and the Constitution that they framed, were
rooted in direct personal experience of the political and social
institutions that had developed in the Thirteen Colonies since the
middle of the 17th century, and in

Russell Kirk is a Distinguished Scholar at The Heritage
Foundation.

He spoke at The Heritage Foundation on September 11, 1986.

ISSN 0272-1155. Copyright 1986 by The Heritage Foundation

thorough knowledge of the British growth, over seven centuries, of
-parliamentary government, ordered freedom, and the rule of law.
They acknowledged no Omniscient Book as their political oracle; and
despite the fancy of various American professors that t he Framers
were enthusiastic devotees of 3ohn Locke, nobody at the Convention
even mentioned Locke's Civil Government.

A moment ago I remarked that the conservative mind looks to custom,
convention, and continuity for an understanding of the civil social
o rder--not to such artificial constructions as the pretended
Social Contract. Let us define our terms, by reference to-the
larger dictionaries.

custom is common use or practice, either of an individual or of. a
community, but especially of the latter; habi tual repetition of
the same act or procedure; established manner or way. In law,
custom signifies the settled habitudes of a community, such as are
and have been for an indefinite time past generally recognized in
it as the standards of what is just and r ight; ancient and general
usage having the force of law.

convention is the act of coming together; coalition; union. This
term also signifies general agreement, tacit understanding, common
consent, or the foundation of a custom or an institution. Conventi2
n implies a customary rule, regulation, or requirement, or such
rules collectively; sometimes more or less arbitrarily established,
or required by common consent or opinion; a conventionality; a
precedent.

Continuity signifies uninterrupted connection of parts in space or
time;-uninterruptedness; in a culture or a political system,
continuity implies an unbroken link or series of links joining
generation to generation# as the Eastern Orthodox liturgy has it,
"ages to ages."

It is possible for.books-to com ment upon custom, convention, and
continuity; but not for books to create those social and cultural
essences. Society brings forth books; books do not bring forth
society. I emphasize this point because we live in an age of
Ideology, and a good many peopl e --especially professors and
graduate students--fall into the curious notion that all
institutions, an 'd all wisdom, somehow are extracted from certain
books. (In religiont this becomes what Coleridge called
bibliolatry.) The Bible is a record of spiritua l experiences, not
the source of spiritual experiences, really. And from time to time
some student has asked me, after a lecture of mine,. "Gee, Doc,
whereld you get all that information? I couldn't find it The
Book"--that is, the Sacred Textbook, ordinari ly a turgid
superficial work written bya mediocre professor whose motive has
been greed. The wisdom of the species is not comprehended in any
seven-foot shelf of books.

2

So, ladies and gentlemen, if you have been seeking forsome
Infallible Manual of Pur e Conservatism--why, you have been wasting
your time. Conservatism not being an ideology, it has no
presumptuous crib, the fond creation of some Terrible Simplifier,
to which the ingenuous devotee of political salvation may repair
whenever in doubt. Do no t fall into political bibliolatry; in
particular, do not regard Kirk's Works as written by one endowed
with the prophetic afflatus.

in those dear dead days almost beyond recall when I used to keep a
bookshop, a small glum man browsed about my tables and sh elves one
afternoon, and presently said to me, almost angrily, "I'm looking
for a book that will tell us what to do about all these modern
problems. But it has to be a small book, and there canl-t be
anything about religion in it." Alas, no small book, or big one
either, has been written to tell us honestly and practically what
to do about all these modern problems, nor will one such ever be
published, not even by a conservative author. And if you should be
seeking for a so'und'book of a conservative cast that has no
religion it it--why, you might as well search for the philosopher's
stone; or inquire, with Tiberius, what songs the Sirens sang.

Therefore in commending to you this day ten:important conservative
books, I provide you with merely a sampling of the literature of
conservatism--not with a corpus of infallible writings on which a
zealot might bass a conservative Thirty-Nine Articles or a Test
Act. Conservative people share a state of mind or a body of
sentiments; they do not necessarily all agree o n prudential
concerns; the variety of conservative approaches to political and
moral' questions is considerable.- I do not argue that t 'hese ten
books I am about to-name are the most important conservative
writings; merely that they are intelligently repr e sentative of
conservative thought. For conservatives do think, even though one
conservative scholar, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, remarks that ordinarily
it is sufficient for conservatives to sit and think, or perhaps
merely to sit. Being no ideologue, the conserv a tive thinker does
not fall-into the error that. the pride and passion and prejudice
of mankind may be controlled and directed satisfactorily by any set
of abstract ideas. To cite the title of a book by my old friend
Richard Weaver (who detested that publi s herls'title to his book),
Ideas Have Consecruences, true; but in politics abstract ideas very
often have bad consequences; and the conservative knows that
custom, convention, and continuity are't'orces socially more
beneficial than are the fulminations of some gloomy political
fanatic. Conservative writing, then, usually is undertaken with
some reluctance, and chiefly in reaction against radical or liberal
tracts pretending to'point out the path to the earthly Zion. So it
was with Burke two centuries ago, and so it is today with Malcolm
Muggeridge or Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

From my list I have eliminated certain great statesmen, because
what they wrote was of little enduring influence, although what
they

3

did had large enduring consequences. Also I have left out the great
conservative novelists, among them Walter Scott and Benjamin
Disraeli and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Louis Stevenson and
Rudyard Kipling. and Joseph Conrad, because they did not write
specifically of conservative political question s, even though
their indirect influence upon public opinion may have been vast. In
short, I confine myself this day to books directly and
unquestionably political in subject and conservative in tone.

In-1955, addressing the London Conservative Union,.-T. S. Eliot
named Bolingbroke, Burke, Coleridge, and Disraeli as the chief
conservative men of letters; and of living or recent American
writers--quoting from a letter of mine to him--Eliot mentioned Irv
i ng Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Bernard Iddings Bell, and Robert
Nisbet. Since Bolingbroke, Coleridle, and Disraeli none of them
wrote a one-volume manual of politics that would be readily
apprehended by the modern reader, I must pass them by in our
discussi on today. I am going to say something about Burke and
Babbitt and Eliot and Nisbet, nevertheless.

Some present here today may desire to commence their serious study
of conservative thought by reading some succinct but sensible
manual on the subject. If so, I commend particularly a brand-new
slim volume by Robert A. Nisbet, entitled simply Conservatism:
Dream and Reality (University of Minnesota Press),, agreeing with
everything in it except for Dr. Nisbet's attempt to classify
conservatism as an ideology, a nd his praise of Kirk's Works. Two
earlier slim volumes on this subject, both by the same title, The
Case for Conservatism, were written by Francis Graham Wilson and by
Quintin Hogg; both unhappily are out of print. If you desire an
anthology of conservat i ve essays, speeches, poems, and tales, The
Portable Conservative Reader, edited by your servant, is very much
in print;. if what you seek is an historical analysis of
conservative thought, the seventh (and presumably final) edition of
your servant's tall book The Conservative Mind will be published
this' month. Now for the ten books to which I particularly direct
your attention, as swimming in the main current of conservative
thought; I describe them more or less in chronological order.

One begins with Burk e, for.the word "conservative" was not part
of the vocabulary of politics until French admirers of that Irish
statesman adapted that word to describe the principles of men who
would join to the best in the old order of Europe those necessary
healthful imp rovements which would preserve the continuity of
civilization. Without Burke's speeches and pamphlets, and
especially his eloquent Reflections on the Revolution in France,
conservatively inclined people would be intellectually
impoverished. As even Harold

4

Laski wrote once, "Burke has endured as the permanent manual
without which statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea."
Foreseeing the revolutions of our time, Burke expounded the
principles of social order that conservatives have endeavored ever
sin ce to defend.

I have discussed Edmund Burke in several other Heritage
Lectures. Were it possible, I should like to discuss his
contemporary John Adams, in some sense his American counterpart;
but much though Adams wrote, no one treatise of his stands out as a
seminal wotk of politics that has greatly influenced men of
conservative inclinations. This is a pity, for abundance of wisdom
and wit are to be encountered in the ten fat -Volumes of his
writings, edited by his grandson, that were published in 1956; or
in the many volumes of the Adams Papers that were published.more
than a century later. Yet I suppose that very few people have
joined me in reading every sentence of Adams that ever was
published; so I must pass on for my second conservative book--comm
ending in passing George A. Peek's The Political Writings of John
Adams, an anthology--to the conservative writer whose influence, at
least in America, has been second only to Burke's.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, still the best
sociologic al study of our mass-age, was written in dread of the
tyranny of the majority and of democratic materialism; the second
volume of that great work is strongly influenced by Burke's
writings. Tocqueville understood the drift of the American people
in the fi rst half of the 19th century as did no one else; and the
drift still is in the direction he predicted, though we-are a
century and a half farther down the river.

Incidentally, although Dr. F. A. Hayek abjures the term
"conservative" along with the terms "l iberal" and "libertarian,,"
nevertheless he acknowledges his discipleship to both Burke and
Tocqueville, calling himself an Old Whig, as did Burke; so perhaps
he is more of a conservative than he pretends to be.

For our third conservative book, I offer yo u'The American
Democrat, by James Fenimore Cooper, a contemporary of Tocqueville.
Despite the strong surviving popularity of the Leatherstocking
Tales, even among serious critics of literature, not one-twentieth
the number of people have read The American Democrat as have read
Democracy in America; one hopes that the handsome new-edition of
The American. Democrat brought out a few years ago by Liberty
Classics may find its way into the hands of attentive readers. Its
strongest point is Cooper's bold advoca cy of the need for
honorable leadership in a democratic society.

Chronologically, there now looms up the strong-minded John C.
Calhoun; but neither A Disguisition on Government nor A Discourse
on the Constitution, respected though both books are by politic al
scientists, is readily understood by many people nowadays. So for
our fourth volume I take from my shelves a book by an ardent
Catholic who

I refer to The Ame rican Republic, published in 1865, by Orestes
Brownson, a Catholic Yankee, long-lived and argumentative. One
thing on which Mr. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and I agree is the
importance of Brownson. Calhoun and Brownson were the first
American public men t o use the term conservative as a word of
praise--so early as the 1840s. Brownson was the first writer to
reply, sternly and systematically, to Marx's Communist Manifesto.
The American Republic analyzes this country's unwritten and written
constitutions, a nd desckibes the American mission of reconciling
the claims of authority and of liberty.

Because this lecture is delivered in Washington, I emphasize
American books relevant to our national concerns; were I speaking
in Britain, I would say more about English and Scottish political
writers. In Victorian-England the books of James Fitzjames Ste p
hen, W. E. H. Lecky, and Henry Maine were written to withstand the
threat of democracy and socialism. As our fifth book, I select
Stephen's Liberty. Eguality. Fraternity---a mordant refutation both
of the slogan of the French Revolution and of John Stuart Mill's On
Liberty. I believe Stephen's powerful assault can be obtaiTe-d from
a reprint house, at a high price.

As the end of the 19th century approached, the wittiest and most
systematic of English conservative men of letters was W. H.
Mallock, the autho r of more than a score of books, ranging all the
way from psycholo4ical.novels and volumes of travel and memoirs to
keen economic analyses. Except for his satirical first book, The Ne
Republic--Mallock is read scarcely at all nowadays, and most of his
Eoo k s are' unobtainable in the United States except at great
research libraries. Yet I strongly urge you to lay your hands, if
you can, upon a copy of the sixth conservative book of my choice,
Mallock's Is Life Worth Living? This polemical work, powerfully wr
itten, is a warning against-the personal and social ennul: that
follows upon a general loss of the religious sense: a society bored
to death.

Turn we again to the Americans. During the first three decades
of the 20th century two important critics of litera ture, Paul
Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, were the most intelligent
conservatives ' in-this' country. It is difficult to choose between
More's Aristocracy and Justice and Babbitt's Democracy and
Leadership--the latter available from the Liberty Press, wit h an
introduction by your servant. But let me recommend, for our present
purposes, Democragy and Leadership as our seventh book of this
confining list. Babbitt courageously endeavored to restore an
understanding of the true meaning of justice, and to remin d his
time of the perils of materialistic expansion and centralization,
and to defend the ethical purpose of humane letters. Late this year
there will be published by the National Humanities Institute a new
edition of Babbitt's

6

Literature and the American Colljge, with a very long
introduction by me. Several of Babbitt's and More's books have been
reprinted in recent years--a sign of the renewal of conservative
thought.

. Both before and a fter the Civil War, half the important
conservative books,of Am erica have been written in the South. As a
noble specimen of the conservative mind of the South, I take for my
eighth conservative book The Attack on Leviathank. by Donald
Davidson, of Tennessee, poet, critic, historian, ballad-collector,
champion of the' s outhern inheritance. I happened upon The Attack
on Leviathan in a college library when I was a freshman,, ahd-it
converted me into an adversary of the consolidated mass-state. In
Policy Review's pages, more than two years ago, I gave some-account
of how t h at eloquent book was virtually suppressed by the
university press that published it; Davidson, when we met in the
1950s, was surprised that I had found a copy anywhere. But the book
has been reprinted by another firm, and you ought to seek it out,
for it is the most important ignored political work of'America in
this century.

Most influential economists have been liberals old style or
liberals new style, and sufficiently narrow in their views of human
existence. For my ninth conservative work, however,, I name The
Social Crisis of our Times, by-my old friend Wilhelm Ro"pke, of
Germany and Switzerland. This book is an analysis of the menace
that RSpke called "the cult of the colossal." of the many
unpleasant consequences of mass society, the worst is prolet a
rianization. We must find our way back to the humane scale, in
economics and in politics: "Socialism, collectivism, and their
political and cultural appendages are, after all, only the last
consequences of our yesterday; they are the last convulsions of t h
e nineteenth century,i and only -in them do we reach the lowest
point of'a century-old development along the wrong road; these are
the hopeless final stage toward which we drift unless we act...'.11
So R'dpke wrote about 1949. The several books of this re markable
social thinker now are quite - unavailable *in the United States,
except possibly for A Humane Economy (to which I gave the
title).

As my tenth conservative book, I recommendthat you read,
friends, T. S. Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Cul ture.
President Nixon, in the White House, once asked'me what one book he
ought to read, the narrow limits of his leisure considered. "Notes
towards the Definition of Culture," I replied; and when he inquired
why, I explained that this slim volume touches upon the reasons for
the decadence of modern society, the substitution of a bureaucratic
specialized elite for a healthy leading class, the relationships
that ought to be maintained between men in public station and men
of ideas, and what is worth preserv i ng in our culture. More than
any other writer of the 20th century,, Eliot stood up for custom,,
convention, and continuity in society, and for the moral order of
our common civilization. You should read, too, his other little
volume about our civil social order, The Idea of a Christian
Society. Both volumes

7

remain readily available in bookshops: Eliot's high reputation
is difficult to squelch.

There! I have opened the covers of ten books for you--choosing
them with some eye to the diversity of the con servative
impulse--and have mentioned other good ones. Reflections an the
Revolution in France, Democracy in America, The American
Democrat*IThe American Republic, Libertyj Equality, Fraternity,-Is
Life Worth Living?, Democracy and Leadership, The Attack o n
Leviathan, The Social Crisis of Our Times, Notes towards the
Definition of Culture--if you line up those volumes on a shelf and
religiously read one chapter in one of them each night.,, until you
have read and digested all ten, you will acquire very con s
iderable political and moral wisdom. Their several authors were an
Irish politician, a French traveller and man of law, a novelist in
the state of New York, a Catholic journalist, an English judge, an
English satirist, a Harvard professor, a Southern poet , a Swiss
economist, and.an Anglo-American man of letters: not one of them,
let it be noted, a professor of political science.

With great ease I could have named for you ten other
conservative books, quite as important, some of the alternative ten
by the w riters I have named today, but others by quite different
authors. The literature-of conservative opinion, accumulating over
two centuries, has grown impressive in its bulk, as in its high
quality. The question remains whether one may readily put his hands
upon most of it.

You will have observed that I have named not one book, of my
ten, by an author still living. That is not for lack of titles from
which to choose; rather, I am embarrassed by a.wealth of
interesting and competent conservative writing today --which is not
to suggest that we suffer from a surplus of original genius. Some
of the more perceptive conservative minds today are to be
encountered in unexpected places: Tage Lindbom, in Sweden, for one,
or persecuted Russian writers of the USSR. Among men of high
intellectual powers and literary arts still in this land of the
living, here in America, are Elisso Vivas, Andrew Lytle, Cleanth
Brooks, and a score more I might name: men of letters of a
conservative cast of mind. On the other hand, I note th a t in the
late John East's forthcoming book about American conservative
political thinkers of the past few decades, only one still lives..
Eric Voegelin, Willmoore Kendall, Lao Strauss, Richard Weaver,
Frank S. Meyer, Ludwig von Mises--all have departed fr om this
bourne. The last leaf on John East's tree of the Philosophical
Founders stands before you.

8

I am reasonably sure that some of you present here today have
reflected to yourselves, during this past half hour,, "If so large
a body of good or even great books of a conservative character
exists,. why is it that we infrequently encounter such volumes i n
bookshops or public libraries? Why were we not introduced to such
books in school, college, and university? Why are not books of this
sort on the best-seller lists? Why do we read reviews of
them--supposing them reviewed at all--only in periodicals of a
confessedly conservative persuasion, or in some religious journal,
or at most in-The Wall Street Journal? Why does even National
Review apparently prefer to review at length books already reviewed
by TRe New York Review of Books or The New York Times?"

An d why, you may have ruminated,, are a good many of the old
books commended today so long out 'of print? Why does no publisher
make them available, when they are frep, most of them, of copyright
restraints, and when presumably they wod-ld sell as well to t h e
American public as do many serious books of a different school of
thought that are readily picked up in bookshops? Why is the
publishing of recognizably conservative books, new or old, confined
to a few small or smallish publishers, with limited capital and
modes of distribution--Regnery Gateway (now moving its offices to
Washington), Sherwood Sugden, . Liberty Classics/Liberty Press,
occasionally one of the university presses?

Why, because there still prevails a leaden domination over
trade-book publish ing, and for the most part over scholarly
publishing, by yesteryear's climate of ritualistic-liberal opinion.
To find a Manhattan publisher for any well-written book that seems
to reflect the wisdom of our ancestors is as arduous an undertaking
as one of the labors of Hercules--and less attended by success.

This hegemony of an archaic.American liberalism, grown perfectly
intolerant and flinching at shadows, extends to book reviewing in
the very large majority of both popular and scholarly-media of
criticis m. At the very time when public opinion has shifted
massively toward conservative measures and men, the intellectuals
of the publishing world have marched off defiantly in an opposite
direction. They are very willing, as a breed, to make much money by
pub lishing pornography and reviewing-it in a snickering,
titillating fashion; but even.the prospect of profit will not tempt
these lofty-minded editors' and reviewers to touch conservative
pitch and be defiled.

Of the books I have commended this afternoon, th e majority
still linger in print, but are not readily come by in bookshops or
public libraries; while some have been quite unavailable for a long
while. Had 1 named conservative books by authors less famous, I
might as well have been talking about the van ished books of Livy's
history, for all the chanc'a you ladies and gentlemen might have
had of finding a copy to read.

9

The origins of this anti-conservative mentality among
publishers' editors and among reviewers and librarians are worth
discussing; for that,, however, another lecture would be required;
and remedies for this discriminatory malady will not soon be found.
Ons'palliative might be an injection of capital into publishing
firms that know the meaning of custom, convention, and continuity;
but apparently (with a few honorable exceptions) the people whom
Franklin-Roosevelt reproached as Malefactors of Great Wealth think
books of small consequence.

At the beginning of this lecture, I remarked that the
conservative impulse is not the product of boo ks, but rather of
attachment to custom, convention, and continuity. Conservatives are
more concerned with real things than with the abstractions of the
Academy of Lagado or of Cloud Cuckoo-Land... Nevertheless,
fallacious books have had a great deal to do with fetching down the
old framework of order in most of the world, during the past 200
years; and sound books about the human conditi on and about the
civil social order can accomplish much, by rousing a healthy
intellectual reaction,, to preserve order and justice and
freedom.

The number of Americans who read serious books of any sort and
form their-judgments upon them seems certain to diminish even more
rapidly during the remainder of this century than it already has
since the Second World War. This dim inishing remnant,
nevertheless, may amount to that body of unknown persons who, Dicey
says, are the real authors of public opinion. The great
conservative writers always have addressed a minority of the
reading public; but that may be changing, as the rea d ing' public
itself is much narrowed and filtered by films and other-dubious
entertainments. As Lionel Trilling suggested mournfully in 1950,
the literary imagination of the liberals is bankrupt. So it might
come to pass, paradoxically enough, that conserv ative books may
command more authority and influence in the 21st century than they
could in the 18th, the 19th, or the 20th.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) says it's "a great way to start the day for any conservative who wants to get America back on track."

Sign up to start your free subscription today!

Sorry! Your form had errors:

About The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation is the nation’s most broadly supported public policy research institute, with hundreds of thousands of individual, foundation and corporate donors. Heritage, founded in February 1973, has a staff of 275 and an annual expense budget of $82.4 million.

Our mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Read More